The problem when you invent the game, writes Jonathan Wilson in the opening
sentence of The Anatomy of England: A History in Ten Matches, is that
everything thereafter is in some way an anticlimax.

English football might care to ponder that thought today, on the 140th
anniversary of the first official international fixture. On November 30
1872, St Andrew’s Day, an England team travelled to Glasgow to play Scotland
in front of 4,000 spectators at the Hamilton Crescent cricket ground. The
match finished goalless, perhaps the first time that the anticlimax to which
both nations have grown familiar over the